A tournament like the BNP Paribas Open serves as a corrective, for both the perfect and the admiring imperfect.

If most of our lives are contests with what is within us as much as with what is without us, then each of us is two when we watch tennis—the person who dreams inside the person who acts. The person, that is, who dreams of hitting a ball the way a Nadal or Wawrrinka does, say, inside the person whose